The good news: “The Matrix: The Resurrection,” the fourth film in the “Matrix” series that began in 1999, is not embarrassing. It’s not necessary either, but it’s at least not embarrassing. As an action movie, futuristic high-tech is even quite impressive.
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The thing is, The Matrix movies were never just action movies and MDAs, but brilliant cinematic texts that ingeniously articulated a concise and always relevant parable about the essence of life, their meaning, and the big questions people ask themselves – lost in content or ignored: who am I? , What is the purpose of the world, is there free choice or a pre-written fate, is everything random and random or is there a big program we all share?
The Matrix: The Revival is also part of a larger program that we are all pioneering: Warner Studios’ program, as the content provider of the HBO Max streaming service, to loot any reputable item from the studio’s rights vault and resurrect it. And so, for “Game of Thrones” a sequel will be produced, for “Sex and the City” a sequel arose, members of the “Harry Potter” film crew were grouped for an upcoming reunion show, after the “Friends” team had already done the same thing, “One Who Knows” back “Dexter” is back, “The Sopranos” has got a cinematic prologue episode and “Gremlins” will become an animated film. There is no need to keep up to date with entertainment news sites as to the circumstances of the film’s creation, they are explicitly stated in the film itself, in a sort of self-conscious reflexive trick, because now everything is meta, not just Facebook.
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Reeves in “The Matrix: The Resurrection.” A secular look at the original film
(Photo: AP)
Keanu Reeves returns to play Thomas Anderson, who remembers nothing of his adventures in the original trilogy, including the fact that he died in the storm. Today he is not a hacker but a programmer and designer of popular computer games, including the Matrix trilogy of games, into which he inserted flashbacks, dreams, characters and events that haunt his post-traumatic consciousness.
Although he vows not to have a fourth “Matrix”, his boss (Jonathan Groff) makes it clear to him that the rights are in the hands of the Warner Brothers (so, really, explicitly) and they will do a fourth “Matrix” with or without him, so it’s better with him. Sisters Lana Anna and Lily Waszowski, creators of the original trilogy, received just such an offer. Lena decided to respond to her, Lily stayed outside. The Matrix 4 contains a lot of thoughts and allusions that can be linked to Anna’s personal processes since the original film, and the transition she made from her previous identity as Larry Wowowski to the current one as Lana Wowowski, but it’s hard to escape the hints that the film is an act of consensual coercion.
While “Dune,” Warner Studios’ previous large-scale remake, came after several failed starts to process the original, creating a large and significant film, “The Matrix: The Revival” is an attempt to recreate a work that was already perfect. Watching the first Matrix, in March 1999, was a formative experience. We have never seen a film like this – the brilliant script, which uses contemporary jargon to present ancient philosophical and theological ideas, was dressed in a breathtaking, eye-opening and groundbreaking action film that was a milestone in the history of cinema. The two sequels that came out at the beginning of the millennium were met with disgust from fans because they did not have the sense of revelation that was in the first film, but we were not on the side of the hitters – yes, it was not close to the greatness of the original, but there were some great ideas.
The first “Matrix” was so rich in ideas from both consciousnesses that it could be defined as one of the scriptures of the cinematic canon. It is no coincidence that Judaism, Kabbalah, Buddhism, and Christianity have used it to illustrate their teachings, because the Waszowski sisters did a fine job of exploring common ideas for religions, and well constructed The Matrix as a film about spiritual awakening. The Matrix: The Resurrection, on the other hand, could be considered at most one of the external books, offering a secular view of the original text. It seems that Lana Waszowski is back in question.
The original film dealt with a teacher-student encounter. Morpheus – in the role of rabbi, guru, priest or philosopher – educates Thomas Anderson as the Messiah and Savior, teaching him about the essence of the world as an illusion, the world of lies versus the world of truth, introduces him to the tools humans have to manipulate nature and creation . Respectively, the Wasowski sisters created a new cinematic language, which went deep into the visual vocabulary of the 21st century, to represent how this reality is created and changed at every moment anew. The new film, however, is a call for mental help, a documentation of a nervous breakdown. The encounter this time is not between a teacher and a student but between a psychiatrist and a patient. The Creator of the world now is not an architect, who is reshaping our world, but a psychoanalyst, the one who is supposed to explain and reassure that everything is fine, and everything that seems to us to happen, happens only in our head.
“The Matrix: The Resurrection” borrows images from zombie movies to say something about a reality that intoxicates itself through movies and computer games, and a world designed and programmed by men. Thomas Anderson understands that his computer games are based on the truth he experiences, and now they have become a drug that hides this truth from the eyes of the masses. At the opening of the film, he creates a new computer game called “Binary”, when we – the spectators in the hall – know that it is a lie. The world is not binary, and Lana Waszowski will testify. The first “The Matrix” was a film with a queer subtext that was ahead of its time (today, of course, the undercover has become visible). “The Matrix: The Resurrection” is not a religious film, but a romantic work, about Orpheus who comes down to ask to redeem Auridica from there. It’s a less condensed text, which repeats too many moments from the first trilogy. For followers of the first film this is a reasonable and somewhat frustrating addition, of creators desperately clinging to their climax. For those who have never seen The Matrix, it is doubtful that this film will make them realize what the big deal was, from that film – which was the burning bush of the late millennium.
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